Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [254]
Malcolm MacDonald now concluded that Gent’s useful time was at an end. The governor’s future had been in doubt since the beginning of the year. On a visit to London in May, MacDonald pressed for his recall, and Attlee was informed of it. Ironically, MacDonald’s main argument related not to the issue of communism but to the fact that Dato Onn and other Malay leaders ‘dislike him and distrust immensely’. The overriding reason for the seeming inertia in dealing with the strikes and violence was the fact that MacDonald’s own argument of the previous June still held: the Labour government would not permit the banning of the MCP unless there was conclusive evidence for its conspiracy to overthrow the local government. The Malayan Security Service had issued dire prognostications about the MCP – and equally about the Kuomintang and ‘Indonesian’ influences – but it had given little in the way of a hard assessment of communist intentions.51 As one watcher of the skies in Whitehall, J. B. Williams, commented on 28 May after reading intelligence reports, the effect was ‘almost of melodrama. It conjures up pictures of hordes of people burrowing mole-like in the interstices of Malayan society or scurrying hither and thither on their mischievous errands, so that one may almost wonder whether that society is not about to rock to its fall’. But, Williams concluded, nothing ‘would lead us to suppose that any serious trouble is brewing in Malaya. The threat, such as it was, came from ‘mere bandits’ rather than the communists whose ‘immediate threat is but slight’.52 Two weeks later, on 14 June, the British government received Dalley’s own assessment: ‘There is no immediate threat to internal security in Malaya, although the position is constantly changing and is potentially dangerous.’53 This gave no firm indication that the MCP had ordered an armed revolt. But no such command had, in fact, been issued: it was contingent on the actions of the British themselves.
CALLS TO ARMS
Two days later, on the morning of 16 June, at 8.30 a.m., three young Chinese appeared on bicycles at the office of 50-year-old Arthur ‘Wally’ Walker, manager of Elphil estate in Sungei Siput. One came to the door and greeted him respectfully, ‘Tabek, Tuan’, ‘Greetings, sir’; the two others went round the side and fired two shots into the back of his head, killing him instantly. A terrified Indian estate clerk witnessed the affair. Around half an hour later, on Phin Soon estate, the two planters there, 55-year-old John Allison and his 21-year-old assistant, Ian Christian, were surrounded by a dozen Chinese, taken onto their veranda and made to sit on chairs. Both men were then executed. The Chinese shouted to the watching labourers in Malay: ‘We are out only for the Europeans. These men will surely die today. We will shoot all Europeans.’ Walker and Allison had been prisoners of the Japanese. Christian, a former Gurkha officer, had been in the country for only a few weeks. A few days earlier he had approached his old comrades in the Gurkhas stationed nearby and borrowed an old Luger. The Gurhkas had promised to go pig shooting on the estate the next weekend as a deterrent to trouble.54 Years later Chin Peng reflected on the killings: ‘From the revolutionary’s point of view at the time, I saw no validity in the killing of Christian. The deaths of the other two were acceptable.’55 They had been implicated in the bitter disputes in Sungei Siput over evictions from estates and forest reserves. Now labourers took their revenge. The murders were a consequence of the orders that had been issued in May, and perhaps could have occurred in any number of places, but they were unplanned